Case Study · Standard Growth Program + AEO

How a Pittsburgh-Area Landscape & Hardscape Contractor Went From Generic SEO to Closing 80% of Website Leads

Landscaping & hardscapingGreater PittsburghSEO + Google Ads + LSA + JBL Connect24-month snapshot

5x+estimated return on every marketing dollar

1,000+paid leads tracked at a ~$36 blended cost per lead

71Local Services leads in the best single month

80%of website leads closed, in the owner's words

The Challenge

This contractor wasn't starting from zero. They'd worked with a generic SEO agency and had a website with some optimization behind it. Business was coming in.

The problem was the ceiling. Generic SEO treats a landscape contractor like any other business: some keywords, some blog posts, a site that exists. There was no holistic program built around how homeowners actually buy outdoor work, no industry-specific targeting across paid and organic together, and no system for what happens in the minutes after a homeowner reaches out, which is where landscape jobs are actually won and lost. The owner wanted to take it to the next level, not maintain the plateau.

The Strategy

We moved them onto our Standard Growth Program and built the machine around their trades and their service area:

Industry-specific campaign architecture. Google Ads and Local Services Ads built trade by trade: landscape design, driveways, land clearing, and a seasonal snow-removal push, each aimed at the townships they actually serve. Retargeting campaigns stayed in front of homeowners who had visited the site but hadn't called yet, because a $15K backyard isn't an impulse buy.
Speed-to-lead through JBL Connect. Every service and estimate request on the website now fires a text and an email to the owner's phone the moment it arrives. Homeowners hire the contractor who responds first; this makes that contractor our client, every time.
The feedback loop that makes ads smarter. Standard in every Growth Program: JBL Connect reports back to Google when a lead books an estimate and when the job is sold, so the ad platforms optimize for people who actually hire, not people who fill out forms. Lead quality compounds month over month.
SEO built for how people search now. Locally relevant, answer-first content for every service, which ranks in Google and gets cited by AI assistants. We track both in Google Analytics and attribute every lead's source in the CRM. One headline ranking carries a cluster of associated searches with it, and the commercial intent of those clusters is what turns into phone calls.

The Results

A lead engine, measured. More than 1,000 paid-platform leads over the snapshot window at a blended cost per lead around $36, straight from the ad platforms' own conversion tracking. Local Services alone peaked at 71 leads in a single month, at roughly $29 each. Most were direct phone calls from homeowners in their service area asking about driveways, retaining walls, landscape installs, and plowing.

Local Services leads per month growing from 18 to a 71-lead peak for a Pittsburgh-area landscape contractor

Rankings where the buying happens. The site holds #1 in their market for "snow removal near me," "landscaping companies near me," "mulching services near me," and "landscape installation near me" (that one climbed 40 positions), with top-10 positions for "landscapers near me," "landscape companies near me," and "hardscape contractors near me." The snow cluster matters strategically: it fills the calendar in the exact months landscape revenue used to go quiet.

Near me keyword rankings won across greater Pittsburgh including number 1 for snow removal near me and landscaping companies near me

Closing, not just collecting. This is the part the owner talks about. In their words:

"I get a text, I get an email... in the past two weeks I can probably count on one hand how many deals I haven't closed from the texts I've been getting on my phone. We've been closing 80% of the deals we've been getting from that."

Owner, Pittsburgh-area landscape & hardscape contractor

"In the past two weeks, from the deals we've closed just from the notifications I get on my phone and email from the website, I'm going to say $50K in deals sold. It's not like I have estimates. Sold. Pen to paper."

Same owner, same conversation

The ROI Math

The investment: $2,999 per month for the program plus roughly $2,500 per month in Google and Local Services ad spend. Call it $5,500 all-in, about $132,000 over the snapshot window.

The return: roughly 45 tracked leads per month from the ad platforms alone, before counting organic website leads. Run through our conservative attribution framework (70 to 90% attribution on platform-tracked leads, an 80% confidence factor, a 15% close rate against the client's own reported 80% on website leads, and project values weighted well below their larger jobs), that's an estimated $750K+ in generated revenue, a 5x+ return on every marketing dollar.

We deliberately model at a 15% close rate even though the owner reports closing 80% of website-notification leads. If reality sits anywhere between those two numbers, the true return is higher than what we publish. That's the point of conservative math: the number survives scrutiny.

Marketing investment of 132K dollars versus 750K dollars in estimated revenue, a 5x return

The Takeaway

The difference between "a website with some SEO" and a Growth Program isn't effort, it's architecture. Trade-specific campaigns, rankings aimed at buying intent, instant lead notifications, and a CRM feeding sold-job data back to the ad platforms. Same company, same crews. What changed is that every piece now works as one system, and every dollar is tracked.

This is our Standard Growth Program. Want to know what closing 80% of your website leads feels like?

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